Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

As a consequence of the improvement in the performance of onboard devices, the improvement in batteries, or the notorious increase in service demands, autonomous vehicles (such as unmanned aerial or ground vehicles, UAV, or UGV) have turned out to be flexible multi-mission multi-sensorized network platforms with autonomous inter-connection capabilities. They can be linked using multi-hop networks naturally evolving the traditional concept of MANETs (mobile ad hoc networks) into FANETs (flying mobile ad hoc networks) or VANETs (vehicular mobile ad hoc networks), with new requirements and challenges.

On top of these interconnection facilities, new enabling technologies, such as NFV or SDN, are evolving towards flexible service provisioning scenarios, where virtualization and softwarization paradigms have been radically adopted, and new promising use-cases are emerging day in and day out, facilitating service and information delivery in many different areas over heterogeneous networking environments.

Reviews, original research articles, and practical experiences will be published. Reviews should provide an up-to-date, well-balanced overview of the current state-of-the-art, and include the main results from different research groups.

We look forward to, and welcome, your participation in this Special Issue.

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Collaboration between multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to establish a Flying Ad-hoc Network (FANET) is a growing trend since future applications claim for more autonomous and rapidly deployable systems. In this context, Software-Defined Networking FANET (SDN-FANET ) separates the control and data plane
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Collaboration between multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to establish a Flying Ad-hoc Network (FANET) is a growing trend since future applications claim for more autonomous and rapidly deployable systems. In this context, Software-Defined Networking FANET (SDN-FANET ) separates the control and data plane and provides network programmability, which considers a centralized controller to perform all FANET control functions based on global UAV context information, such as UAV positions, movement trajectories, residual energy, and others. However, control message dissemination in an SDN-FANET with low overhead and high performance is not a trivial task due to FANET particular characteristics, i.e., high mobility, failures in UAV to UAV communication, and short communication range. With this in mind, it is essential to predict UAV information for control message dissemination as well as consider hierarchical network architecture, reducing bandwidth consumption and signaling overhead. In this article, we present a Cluster-bAsed control Plane messages management in sOftware-defined flying ad-hoc NEtwork, called CAPONE. Based on UAV contextual information, the controller can predict UAV information without control message transmission. In addition, CAPONE divides the FANET into groups by computing the number of clusters using the Gap statistics method, which is input for a Fuzzy C-means method to determine the group leader and members. In this way, CAPONE reduces the bandwidth consumption and signaling overhead, while guaranteeing the control message delivering in FANET scenarios. Extensive simulations are used to show the gains of the CAPONE in terms of Packet Delivery Ratio, overhead, and energy compared to existing SDN-FANET architectures.
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